Why Russiagate’s not Watergate.

Watch the film All the President’s Men.

If you accept the premise that Woodward and Bernstein brought down Nixon, and you watch them waste half the damn movie trying to discover basic public facts using phone books and pay phones and typewriters and automobiles, it becomes clear that had these reporters been in possession of the internet, Nixon would not have had a second term.

Now roll ahead to 2017. Virtually everything Nixon was blamed for has either remained perfectly acceptable (illegal wars abroad) or been made acceptable or even legal (coverups, lies, obstruction of justice, financial corruption, campaign tricks, warrantless spying, etc.) The open-and-shut cases for the impeachment of Trump are piling up by the score and nobody could care less.

But focus on Russiagate. In place of a couple of novice reporters with steno pads and card catalogues, you’ve got every major media outlet in the United States minus Fox News, plus all the resources of the FBI and a good chunk of the CIA, plus the internet, and the leadership and membership of the Democratic Party. And they’ve had a year to work. And they have had license not only to try to connect a theoretical crime to the president from day 1, but license to publicly proclaim that they’ve somehow already done so. And they’ve not yet produced anything Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman would consider even worthy of blowing their nose on.